About Us

Eyes on Trade is a blog by the staff of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch (GTW) division. GTW aims to promote democracy by challenging corporate globalization, arguing that the current globalization model is neither a random inevitability nor "free trade." Eyes on Trade is a space for interested parties to share information about globalization and trade issues, and in particular for us to share our watchdogging insights with you! GTW director Lori Wallach's initial post explains it all.

Federal lobbying records show that Hunter Biden’s firm was hired in
June by lawyers for J. Russell DeLeon and his wife, Ruth Parasol,
billionaire expatriates who founded a Web site called PartyPoker. Their
company, PartyGaming P.L.C., which later went public in London, stopped
doing business in the United States after President Bush signed a bill
into law in 2006 aimed at curbing online gambling.

Wyeth
Wiedeman, a lobbyist hired by Mr. DeLeon and Ms. Parasol, said Mr.
Biden helped
put together a lobbying campaign to persuade Congress to
pass a law that would clarify the question about whether online
gambling was legal prior to 2006. Mr. Wiedeman said the Justice
Department has been examining the couple and others involved with the
PartyPoker site.

Mr. Wiedeman said Mr. Biden visited a House member from North Carolina to discuss the issue...

Published accounts have said that Ms. Parasol, a lawyer who now lives
in Gibraltar, started out as an adviser to her father’s telephone
sex-chat business and then operated pornographic Web sites before
turning to online gambling.

Hunter Biden could not be reached for comment. David Wade, a spokesman
for the Obama campaign, said Mr. Biden’s involvement in the lobbying
effort “gives much ado about nothing a whole new meaning.” He said Mr.
Biden was hired by PartyGaming’s law firm, Sharp & Barnes, to
provide expert advice because he specialized in electronic commerce and
served on a working group on Internet gambling issues when he worked at
the Commerce Department in the Clinton administration.

There is no report that any of this was connected in any way to the presidential campaigns. To see the official document detailing the $50,000 in lobbying expenditures by Biden for the gambling company investors in the gambling company, click here. (Taken from the Senate Office of Public Records.)

PartyGaming was shut out of the U.S. market when Congress passed an Internet gambling ban in 2006. Interestingly, although their lawyers PartyGaming's investors' lawyers paid Biden Biden's company thousands of bucks to lobby Congress for clarification that online gambling provision was legal prior to 2006, the company actually stated in their public offering documents that they knew it probably was illegal... and that they didn't care. As Kurt Eichenwald reported:

The Justice Department and numerous state attorneys general maintain
that providing the opportunity for online gambling is against the law
in the United States - and PartyGaming does it anyway. Indeed, of its
$600 million in revenue and $350 million in profit in 2004, almost 90
percent came from the wallets and bank accounts of American gamblers.

To justify this, PartyGaming walks a very thin line. Providing
online gambling is not illegal per se in the United States, the company
argues - federal prosecutors just say it is. The company has already
received an e-mail message from the Louisiana attorney general
demanding that it cease providing online gambling in that state;
PartyGaming simply ignored the communication and waited for additional
action that never came.

The company's prospectus - a British document that is not available
in the United States - at times reads something like a legal brief,
citing American case law to support the company's position that no
prosecution would ever take place.

Still, in its offering documents, PartyGaming makes no secret of the
fact that even if the company's view of the law proves wrong, it is
banking on its executives' belief that there is little that law
enforcement can do - or will do - to prosecute. "In many countries,
including the United States, the group's activities are considered to
be illegal by the relevant authorities," PartyGaming says in its
offering document. "PartyGaming and its directors rely on the apparent
unwillingness or inability of regulators generally to bring actions
against businesses with no physical presence in the country concerned."...

Now, as the largest company pushing into the United States market,
PartyGaming is best positioned to benefit if the question of online
gambling is decided in its favor. Already, the World Trade Organization
and foreign governments are siding with companies like PartyGaming and
against the United States.

LATE last year, for example, the W.T.O. agreed with the Caribbean
island nation of Antigua that United States legislation criminalizing
online betting based in other countries violated global laws. An
appellate body at the trade organization upheld the principal
conclusions in that ruling in April.

And it has still been upheld, as we reported on recently in our lawsuit against the Bush administration.

An article on Saturday about a decision by R. Hunter Biden, a son of Senator

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

, to quit working as a

Washington

lobbyist included an incorrect identification from Senator

Barack Obama

’s
campaign for the clients of a law firm, Sharp & Barnes, that had
hired the senator’s son to lobby on an online-gaming issue. The firm’s
clients are two investors, J. Russell DeLeon and Ruth Parasol — not the
company PartyGaming P.L.C.